Category: Worldwide PSE

Another Australian Fee Revolution?

To Australia, where big things may be afoot.  One thing about Australian higher education politics is that they tend not to do small reforms, regardless of which party is in power.  Where undergraduate fees are concerned, it looks like there might be another big shift, so let’s look at the current state of play. Here’s the first thing you need to understand about undergraduate fees in Australia: they don’t work like fees anywhere else in the sense they are not

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The Global Collapse in “College” Enrolments

One thing that’s been quite clear for awhile is that the Canadian community college sector has been seeing a decline in domestic enrolments for the better part of a decade.  Peak domestic community college enrolment was in 2012-13: by 2020-21 numbers were already down by over 10% and my understanding from chatting with people across the country is that domestic numbers have continued to decline in the past two years, quite substantially in some cases.  Obviously, many colleges have found

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Education at a Glance 2022

It’s that day of the year, when OECD releases its annual report on education across the world’s richest countries, known as Education at a Glance.  I have written about these releases many times before, and in truth a lot of the data tells the same story, year after year: Canada has very high attainment rates, mainly due to the way we choose to present our data on college students.  We also spend more than most countries on post-secondary education if

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Global Higher Education to 2050

Thinking about the future of higher education is my bread and butter.  For the last few months, I have been thinking about the extreme long-term and wondering what it all portends for the shape and function of institutions globally.  I’ll share a little bit of what I have been thinking today. If we take a long view – say back to the 1960s, we see a continual increase in the enrolment of students in higher education (which, for the higher

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The Decline of American Higher Education

As recently as five years ago, Americans were generally pretty proud of their higher education system.  Sure, there were complaints, but even when the criticisms were more systemic, they were usually prefaced by the words “we’ve got the best system in the world, but…” It occurred to me the other day that I hadn’t heard that phrase in a while, and not just because COVID has reduced the frequency of my jaunts to DC, where I most often heard it. 

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